28 January, Wednesday:
Today was a travel day. I took a Virgin flight to DC, arrived late in the afternoon, had an early dinner, and went to bed. I am staying in a new “boutique” hotel very close to American Rivers’ offices. As far as I can tell, “boutique” means a décor featuring lots of brown and beige fabrics, artistic touches like a gas fire in the lobby, a circular shower stall, and very artistic lighting which was very nice to look at but actually provided almost no light. The corridors feature dark brown carpets and walls, and such dim light that you practically need a flashlight to read the room numbers. I stumble around in my room, trying to find a light bright enough to read the buttons on the TV remote. Oh well. It is convenient and we got a good deal.
29 January, Thursday:
It was Beagle’s birthday today. It would be easier to call her and wish her happy birthday if (a) she knew how to answer the phone in our apartment, (b) if she carried her European cell phone with her and/or (c) if she could hear her US cell phone when it was ringing. Today was a day of American Rivers committee meetings, pre-Board meeting meetings, an orientation session for new Board members, and a dinner with new Board members. Dinner was in a very fancy Italian restaurant featuring a swarm of waiters who gave us a huge menu, told us about all sorts of special offerings, and told us that in addition to that, we could order anything we wanted. No matter what anyone ordered, it all seemed to come bathed in some sort of red sauce. Not my favorite.
30 January, Friday:
More committee meetings this morning, and the actual Board meeting started at noon. Usual stuff. We had dinner in a big and very nice room at Clyde’s of Chinatown (a former American Rivers’ board member owns Clyde’s, and she hosts us). We were honoring our Vice-Chair, a very nice man named David Hayes, who has just been named Deputy Secretary of the Interior, a position he also held in the Clinton Administration. He had wanted to be Secretary of the Interior, but he made the mistake of being an early and devoted backer of Hillary, so the guy with the big hat (Ken Salazar) got that job. On my left at dinner was Bruce Babbitt, former Governor of Arizona and former Secretary of the Interior under Clinton. On my right were Mark Shields, the columnist and TV commentator, and his wife Anne, who is an American Rivers Board member. Across the table were David Hayes and his wife. Plus Rebecca Wodder, the President of American Rivers, and Jeff Mount, a new director who is a professor at UC Davis. It was an interesting conversation. Lots of inside politics, lots of discussion of personalities, etc., but not all that much that you hadn’t read in the newspapers. I was told that David Brooks (Mark Shields’ conservative counterpoint on PBS) is a nice guy who is very intelligent, respects intelligence, and therefore has been distressed by the Republican party’s anti-intellectual bent, in particular as it has been embodied in Bush. He is conservative, but while from time to time he has views that it would seem hard for an intelligent person to support, in general he is pretty reasonable. However, every once in a while he expresses views that are not considered to be conservative enough, and then he gets taken to the woodshed and given what for by the powers that be in the Republican party who remind him that he is supposed to be representing a conservative viewpoint. In his next few columns/TV appearances, he tends to take a more conservative position! Bruce Babbitt is a nice guy with a good sense of humor, and someone who likes to kid people and doesn’t mind being kidded himself. But he also has a well-developed ego, and even though he has been out of politics for quite some time, he still sees himself as a political power, and makes sure that you understand that! All in all it was an interesting evening.
31 January, Saturday:
Our Board meeting continued, starting at 8 AM. After the meeting we went to the National Museum of the American Indian for a ceremony. One of our Board members is a guy named Ray Gardner, who is the Chief of the Chinook Nation. He had carved a traditional Chinook canoe paddle and was giving it to the museum. There was quite a moving ceremony where ancestors were invoked, etc. and the paddle was handed over. One interesting part was hearing about the history of the Chinook Nation, which consists of 5 tribes. The Chinooks welcomed Lewis and Clark when they got to the West Coast in 1805-1806, and helped them keep from starving. At some point in the sorry history of the federal government’s dealing with Native Americans, the Chinooks were decertified as a “recognized” tribe…supposedly on the theory that there were none of them left. This came as a surprise to the surviving Chinooks, who felt pretty much alive. Federal recognition of a tribe apparently has all sorts of financial consequences, as well as emotional ones. After years of battling, the Chinooks got federal recognition in 2001, but in 2002 the federal government rescinded that recognition. There are hopes that the new administration will be more sympathetic. After the ceremony, I wandered around the museum for a while, and then walked back to my hotel, and then met William for dinner. We had a nice dinner in a very Washington type of restaurant. It was very good, with an interesting wine and beer list, and a quite imaginative menu…tripe, etc. Sort of what you’d expect in a bistro in Brussels, not DC. But the restaurant was just off the lobby of a “Courtyard by Marriot” and a sign on the door said they were closing at 10 PM. On Saturday night. Washington is an interesting city. Perhaps with Obama in charge things will be different, but I did note that on Saturday night at 10PM, the streets on the way back to my hotel the streets were deserted.
1 February, Sunday:
I got up at a reasonable hour and went out for breakfast. I walked for about 4 blocks and saw no one except for some homeless people at a church. And this is a reasonably residential neighborhood…at least there are dozens of buildings advertising apartments for sale and rent. Perhaps they’re all empty. After breakfast I packed and checked out and then walked to 6th and E to meet William. He gave me a tour of his “chambers” and of the courtroom, which is some sort of federal historic site. It was quite impressive. Like the Supreme Court. We then walked on the Mall for a while, returned to Chinatown for lunch (Japanese), and then walked from one end of the Mall to the other and back again. It was a lovely day…very warm, but there was still ice in the reflecting pools, etc. We went into the National Botanical Gardens (or something like that…near the Capitol, anyway), with a tropical jungle inside, and then went to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We went into the museum to use the bathroom after visiting the sculpture garden, but stayed to look at some of the museum exhibits. This was neat. Sculptures by Louise Borgeois (gigantic metal spiders), Rodin, Giacometti, Magritte, etc., and paintings by all sorts of people. Quite a collection. We were impressed. We then walked back to my hotel, retrieved my bags, stuffed them full of peanut butter for Beagle and I got a taxi to the airport. It was nice to see William, even though he walked my legs off. I had a flight to London, and was then going to go directly from Heathrow to Saint Pancras Station in London to catch a Eurostar train for Brussels. My plane left on time and was only partly full, and once we took off the seat next to me was vacant, so I had high hopes for an easy trip back to Brussels. That turned out to be wrong.
2 February, Monday:
This turned out to be the trip from hell. Shortly after takeoff, the pilot informed us that although the weather in London was bad, he expected that we’d land early. That sounded good, because I only had a little less than 3 hours between our expected arrival time in London and the departure time of my Eurostar train for Brussels. I thought that might be a little tight, but with an on-time arrival I figured I would have no problems. Intimations of disaster were felt when, against my better judgment, I ate the dinner they served me on the plane. Within seconds of finishing, my stomach was sending off distress signals. I figured that it was just a spot of food poisoning and that I would soon recover. Then I discovered why my seatmate had moved…a large metal box that was bolted to the floor mostly filled the space underneath the seat next to me, leaving no legroom. So I twisted and squirmed through the entire flight, trying to get comfortable. I never did. As we got closer to London I started feeling worse and worse, and the pilot started making dire predictions. He said that the weather in London was quite nasty, and that there was about an inch of snow. That might, he said, cause us a delay of over an hour and a half. Then he reduced that to an hour, then 30 minutes. Then an hour again. The pilot kept telling us not to worry because we had enough fuel to get to Cardiff if necessary. That was reassuring. It’s sort of like flying from NYC to Chicago and being told you have enough fuel to get to Wilkes-Barre. Cardiff? You mean the one in Wales? Does it even have an airport? And what do you do once you have been lucky enough to land there? Then, suddenly, something must have happened because the pilot announced we were landing, which we did in a cloud of snow and zero visibility. Heathrow was a winter wonderland. Snow everywhere, and not a snowplow to be seen. There was what looked to be about 3” of snow, and absolutely nothing had been plowed. It took us quite a while to get to our gate because, as the pilot said, it was quite slippery out there. Apparently he knew what he was talking about, because shortly after we landed, another plane slid off the runway and they closed the airport entirely. But we made it to our gate, only 45 minutes late. Not bad, thought I, there is still a chance of catching that train. But then we had about a 30 minute wait on the plane because the jetway was full of snow and they had to clean it out before we could disembark. I have no idea how they cleaned it out, since there are evidently no snow shovels in England, but somehow they managed. Judging from the looks of the ground crew standing around blowing on their fingers, I suspect they used their bare hands. I survived the normal Bataan death march from the plane to immigration, a standard ritual designed to separate out the weak from the fit to make sure than none of the former made it into Britain, and smiled sweetly at the immigration officer who laughed at me when I told him I was trying to catch a 10AM Eurostar. He knew more than I did, because after a 30 minute wait at the baggage claim, a Virgin Air spokesman appeared and told us that the little baggage truck which had been hauling the baggage wagons from the plane to the terminal had gotten stuck in the snow, and that they were going to have to transfer our bags from the plane to the terminal one wagon at a time. Since I had checked in early, that meant that my bag was among the first to be loaded onto the plane and thus among the last to appear on the baggage carousel…and to think that in my Master of the Universe days I had a rule of never checking baggage! Feeling weaker by the moment, and with my baggage feeling heavier, I lurched through the terminal towards the Heathrow Express, a train that takes you to Paddington Station in London in 15 minutes. None of the ticket vending machines were operating, and the woman at the information/ticket booth announced that no Heathrow Express trains were running and that she wouldn’t sell any tickets. At this point, I resigned myself to a longer than planned stay in London, and just joined the docile mob standing on the platform hoping that something would happen. After a flurry of announcements, some automated, some made by a real human, all contradictory, it became clear that the next Heathrow Express train would turn up sometime in the spring. Then, magically, a train appeared. This, it turned out, was not a “Heathrow Express,” which would take us directly to Paddington. It was instead a “Heathrow Connect” which would take us to Paddington while making a few other stops on the way. We all got on, and the train proceeded without delay to just outside of Paddington where it stopped for 45 minutes because of “traffic congestion” entering Paddington. About every 5 minutes there was an automated announcement telling us all to have our tickets ready for the agent to collect, but since no one had bought a ticket, the ticket agent had the good sense to stay locked in his little closet. Needless to say everyone on the train was using their cell phones all the time, so within a few minutes I had overheard that London was essentially paralyzed. No busses were running. Only half of the tube lines seemed to be running, and service was sporadic on those that were operating. And, of course, there were no snow plows or shovels in London, so the streets and sidewalks were a mess. Having learned this, I was happy to only have to wait 45 minutes in the taxi line to get a cab from Paddington to Saint Pancras. By observing the amount of snow on taxi roofs, I would guess that London had gotten between 2” and 6” of snow, depending on what part of the city you were in. By the time I got to Saint Pancras I had missed my original train by a good 2 – 3 hours, and Saint Pancras, needless to say, was a zoo. The Eurostar trains were running normally, but everyone had missed their train. So I had another 45 minute wait in line to get my ticket changed. Miraculously enough I was able to get on the next train for Brussels, and they honored my existing no-exchanges, no-modification ticket with not even a blink. The Eurostar trip itself was a non-event, except for a long stop on either side of the Channel Tunnel to deal with unspecified “technical issues.” That only cost us 35 minutes, nothing compared to the other delays of the day. I was happy to get back to Brussels, unpacked Beagle’s peanut butter, and took a nap. Beagle had to go to something at the Academy with Marc and Thérèse, so while they did that I snoozed, took a shower and made myself presentable, and then met them at Saint-Boniface for dinner. That did not prove to be a success. I made it part way through a green salad and then had to leave. The flu had struck.
3 February, Tuesday:
A sick day. I stayed in bed all day while my stomach did a good impression of Mount Krakatoa in full eruption. If the body is normally 95% water, I must be down to 35%. What a way to loose weight.
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